Toby Kunin interviendra (en anglais) autour de l’émergence d’une politique romani internationale en France après la Shoah, le 14 octobre de 15h00 à 16h30 au Campus Condorcet, salle de réunion 5.067 (5e étage de notre bâtiment Recherche Nord) et via Zoom (lien sur demande nadia.malinovich@ephe.psl.eu), à l'occasion d'une séance spéciale du séminaire de l'Axe « Judaismes contemporains, religion, culture, migration: approche comparatiste » du GSRL. Toby Kunin est doctorant au Parkes Institute for Jewish/non-Jewish Relations à l'University of Southampton (UK) et accueilli actuellement par le GSRL dans le cadre d’un Séjour Scientifique de Haut Niveau (SSHN). Ses recherches portent sur le militantisme rom international et ses liens avec l'histoire juive.

The emergence of an international Romani politics in post-Shoah France

In the 1960s, Paris became the centre of a new kind of international Romani politics, with the creation of the first truly international Romani organization, La Communauté Mondiale Gitane. This organization sought to unite Romani people worldwide, in all their diversity, in a shared struggle for their rights. Members were deeply interested in raising public awareness of Romani victimhood during the Holocaust, pursuing material reparations claims from Germany, as well as building a new kind of Romani nationhood – one which often referenced Jews and Jewishness but also presented different answers to different questions about nationality, citizenship, mobility and religion. This talk will focus on the political and intellectual networks created by the group’s founder, Ionel Rotaru, who led the Communiaute Modiale Gitane (CGM) from his home in Montreuil. Rotaru notably attended the 1961 trial of Adolph Eichmann in Jerusalem, and gave a series of press conferences after his return to France in which he elaborated on his relationship to Zionism and what he understood as the connections between Jews and Roma. The talk will also explore the CMG’s relationship with France and the French language, and its place in their imagined vision of "Romanestan".